Why Creative Constraints Fuel Innovation, How P&G's Mexican Detergent Failure Transformed Leadership, and More
How successful leaders create safe spaces for unconventional thinking, leverage 'intelligent constraints,' and extract powerful lessons from even the biggest failures
Leadership In Action: Fostering Innovation – Creating a Culture of Creativity
In today’s increasingly competitive and uncertain business environment, an organization’s ability to innovate has become critical to achieving success and long-term growth.
Of course, an organization’s ability to generate new ideas and solutions depends on a leader’s ability to foster and nurture a culture of creativity. And this means doing more than just encouraging employees to “think outside the box”.
Instead, the onus is on leaders to ensure they are actively dismantling barriers that impede and constrain imaginative solutions from being shared and developed.
So here are four measures you can implement to create a culture of creativity in your organization:
1. Create safe spaces for employees to share new and unconventional ideas
If you want to create a culture of curiosity, you first need to provide a workplace environment where employees feel secure sharing unconventional thinking and challenging existing approaches without fear of reprisal or ridicule.
2. Make brainstorming sessions a regular part of team meetings
With safe spaces in place, it’s important to make brainstorming a regular feature of team meetings. This sends a clear message to your employees that ideation and innovative thinking are not stand-alone activities, but part of the team’s daily work.
3. Reward creative problem-solving by encouraging thoughtful risk-taking
A key aspect of innovation is encouraging thoughtful risk-taking where failures are seen as learning opportunities. This means moving past “failing fast” and taking time to evaluate what went wrong to improve choices to be made going forward.
4. Promote cross-functional collaboration
Inviting people with divergent perspectives is what often leads to breakthrough thinking as they see a situation differently from your team. Welcoming people from different backgrounds and competencies to participate in your team sessions will help foster the creation of novel ideas and approaches.
By applying these four measures, you’re not just helping your employees to better manage a fast-changing environment, but you’re giving them the keys to drive initiatives that will help propel your organization forward into the future.
Get Inspired: The Power of Creative Constraints – Why Limitations Fuel Innovation
When it comes to promoting creativity, there’s a natural tendency to want to remove barriers and limitations so people can be encouraged to “think outside the box”.
Of course, one of the paradoxes of creativity is that the most innovative creations are not borne from a lack of constraints, but from the application of what creativity expert Matthew E May calls “intelligent constraints”.
In my conversation with Stanford professor and organizational psychologist Bob Sutton on my "Leadership Biz Cafe" podcast, he shared a fascinating insight from his latest book, "The Friction Project".
As Bob pointed out, leaders need to learn to distinguish between destructive friction that impedes real progress, and beneficial friction that encourages critical thinking that opens our minds to seeing constraints as a strategic advantage.
One example of this kind of creative constraint was Twitter’s original 140-character limit. While users at first questioned the limitation, this character limit soon became a unique feature of using the platform and fuelled the development of new linguistic patterns, including the use acronyms and emojis in everyday online conversations.
In other words, this creative constraint wasn’t a bug, but a feature that distinguished Twitter from its competitors.
What’s more, researchers at the University of Amsterdam have found that the presence of constraints triggers a response called "global processing” where we make connections between things that are clearly not connected. And it’s this neurological mechanism that serves as the foundation of creativity and innovative thinking.
In other words, we can tap into the power of creative constraints by introducing constructive limitations that will spur our employees’ creative thinking skills.
For example, instead of asking “What’s the best solution?”, you could ask instead “What if we had to solve this in half the time?” Or “How would we address this with a 30% cut to our budget?”
By reframing constraints as opportunities instead of obstacles, leaders can create conditions that allow for unconventional thinking to take hold, giving rise to the innovative potential that exists in the collective creativity of those you lead.
Food for Thought: Embracing Failure – A Stepping Stone to Innovation and Growth
Over the past several weeks, I’ve given keynotes that covered a wide range of topics – from how leaders can help their team overcome performance barriers, to what leaders should do to promote a continuous learning culture.
Despite the varied nature of these keynotes, there was one message I wanted to share with the leaders in attendance because it represents a fundamental truth of what it takes to lead in these uncertain times:
To unleash innovation, we shouldn’t aim to “fail fast”. Rather, we need to create conditions where failure is treated as a stepping stone towards collective learning that will drive innovation and growth.
To help illustrate what I mean, consider this story of when P&G tried to market a new detergent in Mexico. Given its low-income population and limited access to fresh water, they designed a detergent where you used less than the competing brand and it wouldn’t create a lot of suds to save on water.
On paper, this sounded like a winning product to break into this new market. And yet, the product turned out to be a complete failure. So what went wrong?
Well for starters, Mexican consumers didn’t believe you could use less detergent and get your clothes clean. But more importantly, as the product didn’t make a lot of suds, people thought it wasn’t working and so they used even more detergent than their previous brand to make sure it cleaned their clothes.
Thanks to this very public failure, the leaders at P&G realized they had to change their process of developing new products. And the new approach they learned from this failure reflects a strategy creativity expert Matthew E May shared with me on my “Leadership Biz Cafe” podcast.
During his time working with Toyota, Matthew learned about an approach executives used called "Genchi Genbutsu", which in Japanese means “go look, go see.”
In the context of treating failure as a stepping stone to true innovation, this means shifting our mindset from asking “who’s responsible?” to asking “what can we learn?”
That we make ourselves open to learning how we can do better going forward by embracing the hard-earned insights revealed through our mistakes.
The truth is to do anything worthwhile means we must be ready to embrace failure in all its messy forms. It’s the only way that will help you build develop the leadership skills you’ll need to help your organization to succeed and grow in this uncertain, rapidly evolving world.